Scott,

I've been pretty serious the last couple of years in pruning off the tip strikes. Since peaches and nectarines need new wood for the next year's crop, I see it as part of the pruning program for them, so I usually will take the shoot down considerably more, often 12" or so, more on very long branches. I don't know whether it does any good; I still got plenty of strikes this year. I have been trying the Surround Spinosad combination you mention and so far, combined with tip pruning, it seems to be working ok, but I noticed that the product (Monterey Garden spray or some such name) holds you should only do 4 sprays on stone fruit -- which seems to me too few to get me through the season. I never quite know the reasons for these restrictions -- you can do more on pome fruit, for example. Perhaps it has something to do with not building up resistance among the pests of stone fruit.

Scott, Since I discovered holes in the peach shoots I've been cutting flagging tips for years, I thought everybody was doing it. So far I've seen no damage to fruit or leaves yet but I am getting carpal tunnel thinning thousands of fruitlets every week. This afternoon. I'll do my second pesticide fungicide nufilm-17 spray of this season.

Here is a link that might be useful: Oriental Fruit Moth

Austransplant, I am doing more than four sprays, probably more like six. I believe it is for resistance prevention. The Entrust label says at most 9oz per acre which at the lower rates is 6 sprays. This resistance issue is one reason why I am getting more serious about other avenues for limiting OFM numbers. In addition to spinosad I am trying to regularly use oil to help smother the eggs - they take quite a few days to hatch so if every spray I do has oil in it there can be some benefit. Saf-T-Side oil has a double benefit of smothering eggs and preventing brown rot.

This year I am also experimenting with stopping Surround earlier, I have not applied Surround in the last week and plan to not use it again. It is a mess getting all over my clothes and its also pretty expensive. Maybe I will regret that, we will see.

I was out checking the peaches this morning and noticed a few varieties were already getting OFM in the fruits; it is quite variety-specific and most varieties have no damage at all now. Silver Logan is by far the worst; that plus its susceptibility to brown rot is lowering my interest in this peach. I also found that many of its harvested fruits last summer were wormy. I now have over 50 varieties of peaches but plan to eliminate at least half of them so I have the most reliable and best-tasting ones only at the end. So far I have found Veteran and Lemon Free to be not worth it taste-wise and eliminated; now I am thinking about eliminating Tashkent Gold which seems to have too thin a skin so it gets catfacing, cracks and rots too much, and Silver Logan for the above reasons.

Scott

I take it that BT is not affective against OFM?

Scott-

Can you give a rundown...for a given year...what/how many sprays you use on a peach tree? Do you have multiple sprayers/backpack type?

How does a commercial peach orchard in the area deal with these pests? They must use some pretty toxic stuff i take it?

I regret not dormant spraying my peaches for curl.. I don't think we have OFM here.

Frank, you are very lucky if you don't have OFM. I had thought it was about everywhere peaches were but maybe its too cold for them where you are. I do dormant copper, then usually one copper disease spray after petal fall, then its Surround/Serenade for curculio and diseases, and early May I start adding spinosad for the moths and I discontinue Surround mid-May but add oil (and keep the spinosad). The number of sprays I do depends a lot on the rain. Especially with Surround, the rain washes it off so there is a big dependence there. Looking at my logs last year I did something like eight sprays total during the growing season plus the dormant spray.

I used to have only one backpack sprayer but I bought a new one this year, it is 5 1/2 gallons and the extra 1 1/2 gallon is greatly appreciated. I really wish they would make an 8-gallon backpack, I can carry heavy loads and it would avoid the need to refill so much.

The commercial orchards in Maryland all use Imidan or permethrin or similar, the toxic stuff.

Harvestman, Bt is effective but only if you time the spray just right -- you need to get them to eat it to enter the stem or fruit. I'm not sure why spinosad is considered more effective but I think it may not have to be consumed for the bug to get infected. I have thought about combing or alternating with Bt and that is probably a good thing to try.

Scott

Wow. Pretty impressive list.

So i assume the peach has the most sprays? (vs cherry/plum/etc)

I did some research, OFM is not a problem in Wisconsin. Although last year i had my first run in with Japanese beetles, so who knows.

My biggest problem is probably birds.

Frank, the plums get the same spray as peaches except less concern about their tips since the OFM does not drill into the tips; they do infect the fruits however. Cherries also get spinosad for cherry fruit fly plus the same copper dormant sprays. I also always have a problem with leaf-curling aphids on the cherries in mid-May which requires several oil sprays.

Scott

Austransplant, how are your peaches looking now? It looks like I made a big mistake with my experiment of stopping Surround early, I now have far too many peaches with small worms in them. I was hoping the mating disruption lures would make stopping Surround possible but right now I am worse than I was last year at this point - already overthinned on 10% or so of my trees. I am going to resume Surround spraying on the peaches and keep it up for some time. There may have been some other mistakes I made which also made things worse - in general I did not keep the Surround coverage super thick on the peaches compared to the apples. I was also adding oil to the earlier Surround sprays and that may have greatly decreased their effectiveness. That on top of bad weather for long periods which reduced the overall coverage. The Moral: Surround, Surround, Surround!

Re: mating disruption, they say it only works well if you have a low population to begin with and I think my population may have started out too great for that method. I have since added many more lures in the hopes that will improve things in the future OFM generations this year. Next year I am going to put on the Surround earlier, thicker, and in addition be pruning out tip strikes right from the beginning. In combination with that the mating disruption may actually get me into the clear.

My similar plan on the apples (stop Surround earlier; use mating disruption and spinosad only) is thus far a complete success: I have seen zero moth damage on my apples and the codling moth trap has yet to catch a single moth. My biggest concern on the apples is that the OFM will move over to the apples as they mature.

Scott

Scott,

Actually, it is my nectarine I have been spraying; I have a young peach but it only has a few fruit this year. So far so good. Surround plus Spinosad plus pruning tip strikes seem to have surpressed the OFM population. Unfortunately we just got about 4 inches of rain the last couple of days, and it completely washed the Surround off. I am loathe to put more on right now, since more thunderstorms are forecast for the next few days. This has been an extremely wet spring. So I will spray as soon as the weather forecast looks good. I know this risks OFM strikes in the evenings, so I shall have to hope for the best.

Thanks for the information. If you were having bad luck I was going to blame it on the weather but I think my stopping the Surround was my main problem. I have already re-coated with a spray this morning. I'll probably lose half that coat to rains tomorrow but I am trying to dig out of my hole now and save my peaches.

Scott

Sorry to post this late but I have a question. Are yall applying spinosad mixed with surround in the same sprayer or are you applying them seperatley?

Also, on another note it seems strange that there would be a problem with resistance build up since it a physical barrier doesnt it? Maybe Im just not thinking about it correctly. Anyway I am considering giving surround a try next year on peaches and am Looking to get as much info as I can.

Thanks,
Scape

Scape,

I am mixing them together. The resistance concerns are not with Surround but with Spinosad, which is an insecticide and not a physical barrier. If I follow Scott correctly, the point of mixing the two together is that here in Maryland we have a period in which the plum curculio and oriental fruit moth are both present. Spinosad has some efficacy against the fruit moth, but none against the curculio. The Surround is there to keep the curculio off the fruit. So far this strategy seems to have worked quite well. There are still plenty of untouched nectarines on my tree. But when it comes to fruit growing, I don't like to count my chickens before they've hatched. We'll have to wait and see how things stand in a month.

Scott, what makes you think oil would limit the efficacy of surround? The sunspray type oils evaporate quickly (I use Purespray) and shouldn't affect the surround at all as I see it. Given how much Surround encourages scale and mites the oil- Surround mixture would seem ideal. It's what I'm doing here in southeastern NY and it has worked well for me. I started mixing oil with surround on my own calculation (no outside info) so I'm interested in your thoughts and observations.

Scape, I have the same remarks as Austransplant. Since I have resumed the Surround I have seen no new OFM damage; I don't know if its luck or skill but I am going to keep up the Surround for longer next year.

hman, there were some studies where oil was shown to greatly limit the effectiveness of Surround. But, those oils were drying oils - cottonseed oil in particular. I use stylet oil or saf-t-side which are both mineral oils and non-drying (once they dry there is no film left; drying oils leave a film). Non-drying oils may in fact be perfectly fine but I have found no studies or confirmations of that so I decided to back off until I had more data. If a non-drying oil is in fact known to be all gone within say a day then I don't think it would matter if it were added or not.

Scott

By the way getting back to the original subject of this thread I did some reading and my guess at the peak period of OFM moth emergence for me was around May 1st-20th this year (the peak period is pretty evenly spread out over several weeks). I didn't get my confusion lures out until May 11th -- oops! My second generation of moths should start emerging in a week or so, and so around the end of June I will know if I managed to confuse that generation enough that they did not mate enough, because if I see no or limited tip- and fruit-boring I know there was no mating going on in mid-June.

Scott

Time for an OFM update.. I have seen zero OFM activity within the last week. There is always a lull between the first and second flight but I think I am far enough along without any activity at all that I may be seeing a dent in my second flight. Here is a graph of the OFM emergence in Michigan:

{{gwi:94475}}

See below for the full page this came from. The graph is moth catches and the moths are active for around a week or so. I think I am about two weeks shifted from Michigan which means I should be into my second flight by now. This graph is important to keep in mind also for the timing of the sprays -- during the lull when no moths are flying the Surround is not going to help (any worms are deep into their fruitlet or shoot tip away from any spray, or they are in the cocoon stage). I have not sprayed Surround recently for this reason (but may want to start soon). Also there should be a period after the moths have started flying and mating and egg laying, but before the eggs have hatched, and at that point a well-timed oil spray could smother the eggs. At that same point some eggs could be hatching and worms could be trying to bore into shoots and fruits -- a good time to have some spinosad waiting for them. Not too long after the Surround should be put on top.

I am just thinking out loud here; I don't know the right strategy but the point here is timing should not be ignored. Especially early in the season there is a strong periodicity to the OFM and for organic control it can help greatly to keep track of that pattern and plan accordingly.

Scott

Here is a link that might be useful: MSU OFM link

Another update to my mini-blog on The Great OFM Battle of 2009.. I should be just past the peak egg-laying of the second generation now, and about at the peak emergence of the third generation of worms from their eggs. I am finding about a dozen tip strikes per day (this is on about 60 row-feet of peach trees); this rate slowly increased over the last couple of weeks but has not gone up much recently. Most of them it looks like the worm died, but a few had live wigglers in them. I have found only one fruit with a strike on it (the ooze spot). The fruit have been covered as well as I can (given all the rain) with Surround and that seems to be driving the mommies to put their eggs at the tips instead. So, you can view the tips as a "trap crop" for the OFM -- drive them to the tips and then prune them off. My plums have been completely clean.

What I have learned in the last few weeks is first, the importance of cleaning up the drops. I decided to check one area's drops to see how many had worms in it and found almost half did. Fortunately all were still in the fruit and I crushed them. I had not been very good about picking up drops but it is just as important as pruning off the tip strikes. Second I have learned how to detect the tip strikes earlier. If there is any browning at all by the shoot tip, or even the smallest amount of flagging, it is very likely there is a new strike. By pruning out the strikes earlier it gives you more chances to find a given strike (there are lots and lots of shoots I have to look at), and it also damages the tree less, the latter point being especially important for smaller trees. Some of the new trees I put in last year were severely stunted by major OFM strikes on every branch.

My concentration of mating disruptors increased but I am still not disrupting all the mating. I don't understand why the disruptors are working so well on the apple CM but not nearly as well on the peach OFM. One row of peaches is right next to a row of apples so the geographical situation is the same. My overall OFM population is way down from last year, but it is unclear how much of that is due to mating disruption and how much is due to my increased vigilance on pruning the tip strikes.

Scott

Update time.. At this point the number of tip strikes is up in the dozens per day. I am also seeing more fruit damage, still infrequent but I will have many infected late peaches at the current rate. My first peach tree, Gold Dust, ripened and the dratted birds took care of nearly all of them (however, at least in looking at the pecked fruits and the ones left there was little OFM damage). The birds plus my OFM problem has convinced me to pull out some bags for the rest of the season. I have used cotton drawstring "parts bags" to good effect in past years -- I find these bags both block the OFM (the peach doesn't rest against the bag like with the stockings so there is no way the moth can lay an egg through it) and I can tie the peach onto the tree and keep the birds from getting at it. I am soon going to put these bags on a good chunk of the peach crop and compare bagged vs non-bagged from here on out (note I will still get some worms in bagged fruit due to bagging fruit already infected - some fruits lack a visible entry scar due to e.g. stem entry).

In terms of controls I think I can declare the mating confusion a total bust for the OFM. Also I had limited the amount of spinosad I was spraying compared to past year and that is not a good thing - spinosad is very important for OFM control. Overall the early peaches came out pretty good without bagging but I expect the late ones will be mostly wormy by the time we get there.

For next year, at this point I feel I either need one more thing to get a leg up on the OFM, or I need to bag the peaches early. Adding up the time I have spent spraying and tip pruning, I believe the bagging approach is overall going to be less time. It also produces cleaner fruit since peach scab etc is largely blocked. The only big unknown is whether brown rot will be a problem; last time I used these bags I did not have much brown rot in the orchard.

I do have some good news, the squirrels are for the first time in many years completely under control thanks to Kania traps. Usually at this time of year my entire peach crop is getting stolen by them. Also the mating disruption on the apples has completely prevented any damage, and Serenade sprays have thus far kept the fruit completely clean.

Scott

Scott-

OFM is your worst pest?

Can you give a time line of how you would do it next year? Obviously you must have PC? and at what point would you start bagging.

Spray early-thin-then bag?

Frank, OFM is the only bug that I feel is out of control and causing major damage. The PC I can get good enough control with Surround, so that one does not worry me so much.

I don't have a firm plan yet as to when it is best to thin and bag. From my experience some random number of peaches seem to drop on their own, even if the tree is already lightly loaded/thinned. So I don't know if it is possible to thin/bag super early. I do know in past years when I bagged early I had many bags holding a teeny shriveled fruit, but I did not thin aggressively at the same time. So probably to hedge my bets I will thin and bag around dime-sized. Or I may decide I can do something else to make a dent in the OFM, e.g. add a bunch of traps. I have a ton of these disruption lures and I wonder if I could just put tanglefoot on them, maybe with 25-50 traps I could trap out a good chunk of the males. I may try that idea this summer to see if I catch any moths.

Scott

Quick update. I got in a spinosad spray with no rain for a long period after it and that has had a big impact on the OFM, reducing the tip strikes to near-nothing. This emphasizes the importance of rain vs spinosad in spray timing, I was unlucky earlier.

I have focused on bagging as a means for squirrel and bird control instead of OFM - if I see the animals on a tree I get out the bags. The birds are all over my Japanese plums at this point and many of them are now bagged. The plums have zero OFM damage so the bags are all for bird control. I will also try some other bird control measures - just did the hang-cds-in-tree to see if that won't have an effect. Squirrels are stealing a few as well but the birds are the bigger problem.

I have bagged a few of all of my kinds of peaches and plums so I can at least make sure I can try them all. Some of my peaches have been fruiting for 3-4 years and I have yet to try them thanks to the tree rats -- that is what I want to avoid. One example is the Claytons are now ripening and they are a truly excellent peach. I am holding off bagging all the remaining peaches for OFM protection at this point.

Scott

Hey Scott,
Where do you get the bags you are using? The stop the birds huh? I tried footies on my peaches 2 years ago and it failed for two reasons 1) I applied them way too late and 2) the birds pecked right through them if they didnt just haul off the whole piece of fruit. I originaly thought I would not do this again but when I think about how much stpraying I will need to do and then think about hoping the rain doesnt wash off my work (not that that has been a problem at all latley around here) It may be worth the effort of bagging with an effective bag.

Thanks,
Scape

Scape, thats too bad the footies didn't work for your birds. I used them last year on some trees the birds were attacking and they worked. The parts bags are very effective - if the birds try to knock them off you can even tie them to the branch so no amount of knocking will ever get it off. This year the birds are not able to knock off bags even if they are not tied to the branch, they are completely ignoring the bagged fruits. I have had a few squirrels this year and they can knock off bags not tied to the limb but the ones tied up they cannot knock off. I have had squirrels chew through these parts bags in past years but only when they first knocked them to the ground. I am hoping the bags-tied-to-branch may even keep the squirrels at bay.

I mentioned the bags and where to buy them on the thread below. I got mine from Associated Bag but there is another place selling them, packcoinc, which is cheaper and allows ordering in smaller quantities. The main downside is they are 15c per bag for the 5x7 size which I found works best. They are reusable however.

By the way I tied CDs to the plum trees the birds are all over and it does seem to have slowed them down. I have also been scaring them away when I get the chance which has also helped. There are hundreds of plums and I don't feel like bagging them all.

Scott

Oops left off thread I meant to refer to .. see below.

Scott

Here is a link that might be useful: scroll down for my post on parts bags

Another week another update. The OFM population has stayed at a lower level of activity based on number of tip strikes. The peaches I am harvesting now, Galaxy donut peach, are all bug-free. Not sure why their population has lessened; it could be the last spinosad spray was very well-timed or I could be between generations again.

I have recently put out 25 OFM disruption lures sprayed with tangletrap, with the goal of trapping out a large portion of the males. Stay tuned for a progress report on that. Oh, be careful to not spray the tangletrap on your hands, it doesn't come off.

On the tangential topic of bird control, the CDs hung in the plum trees worked, surprise! I am seeing almost no damage. My understanding is visual deterrents only work for a short period, so I will make sure to take them down soon. The Santa Rosas are all harvested and the Satsumas are coming in now. I am seeing almost no sign of squirrels. The bagged fruits are coming out fine. A few were chewed on by birds a bit before I bagged them, and one downside of the bag is those guys rotted in the bag but probably would not have if they were not in a bag.

Scott